Hockey-Graphs is once again excited to be co-hosting the Vancouver Hockey Analytics Conference for its third year! We will be working with the Vancouver Canucks, Simon Fraser University and the great team at CanucksArmy.com.

This year we’ll have a 3 day conference, with 2 days of talks, tutorials, keynotes and great discussions. There will also be plenty of social events throughout the weekend.

All knowledge levels are welcome. If you are interested, you are more than welcome! Nobody will be turned away, everyone is encouraged to attend.

The Call for Presentations is currently open with a deadline of January 8th, 2018. See the website for more details or go here to submit your talk.

Registration has yet to open as we tabulate the final costs to host the venue, among other factors. Check back here or on Twitter, or add yourself to our mailing list, for more information on when it will open. (Note:Expect participants to be capped at around ~175 people.)

I’ve been playing with some NCAA prospect numbers lately and I had a hypothesis.

To set the stage, under the current CBA NHL teams have up to 30 days after a prospect leaves school to sign their drafted prospects to an NHL Entry Level Contract (ELC), or by August 15th after they’ve graduated.

What this means is that teams have an incentive to encourage players they think will become NHLers to sign as soon as possible. The trade-off with signing an NCAA player is the player loses their amateur eligibility and automatically has to move to another league. NCAA prospects typically move on to the AHL or NHL but it is not unheard of to see prospects take a side-step to the CHL in the odd circumstance.

Fandom means a lot of different things to different people. But one thing unites us all: we hope our favorite team will win, and spend a great deal of time thinking how they can.

For those of us who dig a little deeper on the “how” side and use analytics, we hope that our work will eventually make its way to a front office. In some ways, it already has: numerous “hockey bloggers” hirings have been made recently.

But how many and for which teams?

With some research, I’ve culled a working document on all analytics hires for NHL teams and how they may be using analytics. The following descriptions comes from a variety of sources including Craig Custance’s Great Analytics Rankings [Paywall], fellow bloggers from across the internet, media reports, word of mouth and anonymous insiders.

It should be noted that just because a team has made an “analytics hiring”, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they value their input or use the analysis provided properly. In fact, hires can be made simply for PR reasons, and some teams may even give analytics tasks as secondary duties to staff members who do not posses any formal background in the subject. Teams may also have hired private firms providing proprietary data, which in reality may not provide any tangible, verifiable value than what is free and readily available online.